topic Re: Which API to use to list groups in which a given user is a member in Administration & Architecture

Which API to use to list groups in which a given user is a member

rpl — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 14:05:33 GMT

Is there an API that can be used to list groups in which a given user is a member? Specifically, I’d be interested in account (not workspace) groups.

It seems there used to be a workspace-level list-parents API referred to in the answers to this question. The current documentation, however, does not seem to mention list-parents – has it been deprecated?

I know I can get the required info by listing each group's users and parsing the response, but that’s rather tedious. Is there an API for this I haven’t found?

Re: Which API to use to list groups in which a given user is a member

Alberto_Umana — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 17:12:43 GMT

Hello @rpl,

You can explore this API: https://docs.databricks.com/api/workspace/users/get which would return an attribute (“groups”) showing the groups a user belongs to at the account level

Re: Which API to use to list groups in which a given user is a member

rpl — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 06:55:37 GMT

Thanks! But this doesn’t do what I need. It is a workspace-level API that AFAIU returns info on groups that grant the user privileges to the workspace itself, probably also workspace-specific objects like secret scopes, folders etc. If the (account-level) user does not have privileges to he workspace in question, the API returns 404.

What i'm looking for is listing all account-level groups the user is a member in, including groups used to grant privileges to Unity Catalog securable objects. I also don’t necessarily know what workspaces (if any) the user has privileges to when i'm making the query.

Re: Which API to use to list groups in which a given user is a member

rpl — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 12:28:41 GMT

@Alberto_Umana, do i understand correctly that there isn’t currently an endpoint that returns the info I need? May I request this feature be added on the roadmap? 🙂

A bit of context: we have tens of catalogs in Unity Catalog and several workspaces in our account. I’d like a convenient way of querying what groups a user belongs to (our groups are named according to the objects they give privileges to). This would help a lot with troubleshooting when a user reports they don't have access to something they think they should.

I guess for the time being, I need to code a function that uses the python SDK and does some joining.

Re: Which API to use to list groups in which a given user is a member

szymon_dybczak — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 13:43:30 GMT

Hi @rpl ,

Maybe you're looking for following endpoint. This endpoint will return in its payload all groups along with membership info. Then you can easily find where user you're interested in belongs to.

List group details | Account Groups API | REST API reference | Databricks on AWS

Re: Which API to use to list groups in which a given user is a member

rpl — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 13:43:48 GMT

That API returns the members of a group. I'm looking for the converse: i know the user and i'd like to know what groups they are a member of.

Re: Which API to use to list groups in which a given user is a member

szymon_dybczak — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 13:51:57 GMT

This API will return all groups that belong to your account. Also, in the json payload you have members attribute that you can leverge to filter out payload by a member to whom you want to find group names he belongs to.
If you perform that filtration, you'll end up with all the groups this user belongs to.

Re: Which API to use to list groups in which a given user is a member

rpl — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 08:29:31 GMT

Brilliant, thank you! I tried out that one via databricks CLI, but the CLI doesn’t return members. Using the API directly fixed that.

Re: Which API to use to list groups in which a given user is a member

szymon_dybczak — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 08:45:18 GMT

Hi,

Cool, I'm happy that it worked for you 🙂

Re: Which API to use to list groups in which a given user is a member

mthompson2025 — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 11:21:45 GMT

Hi @rpl
Could you pls help me with this ? How did you fixed it using the API

Re: Which API to use to list groups in which a given user is a member

szymon_dybczak — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 13:45:37 GMT

Hi @mthompson2025 ,

Basically, it what I described above. This API List group details | Account Groups API | REST API reference | Databricks on AWS will return all groups that belong to your account. Also, in the json payload you have members attribute that you can leverge to filter out payload by a member to whom you want to find group names he belongs to.
If you perform that filtration, you'll end up with all the groups this user belongs to.

Back then the payload received by using cli was different than the one from rest api. But maybe nowadays they aligned it. You can check it 🙂

Re: Which API to use to list groups in which a given user is a member

noorbasha534 — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 21:40:29 GMT

there will be 2 system tables soon - users, groups. Probably, that makes life easy. I have already requested the Databricks RAS meant for my customer to enabled these for our control plane

Re: Which API to use to list groups in which a given user is a member

mthompson2025 — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 16:04:47 GMT

Hi @szymon_dybczak

I've tested the Groups endpoint but noticed something odd in the response. The API is only returning minimal group information:
"Resources": [
{
"displayName": "",
"id": ""
}
]

The critical "members" attribute is completely missing from the response, making it impossible to determine which groups a specific user belongs to. I expected to see member lists for each group that I could filter through.

Do you know why the API might be returning this limited data? Is this potentially a permission issue with my access token, or perhaps a configuration setting I'm missing?

Re: Which API to use to list groups in which a given user is a member

szymon_dybczak — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 20:58:54 GMT

Hi @mthompson2025 ,

Bit weird. I checked and in my case I got expected payload. Maybe try to add following query parameter to request url:

https://accounts.azuredatabricks.net/api/2.0/accounts/your_account_id/scim/v2/Groups?attributes=displayName,members

You can double check if your group contain some members. As you can see on below screen, databricks-admins group doesn't have any members (and hence missing members attribute)

Re: Which API to use to list groups in which a given user is a member

ECCBV — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 08:20:59 GMT

I've tried this but no member information is returned.... Any idea why and how i can fix this?

Re: Which API to use to list groups in which a given user is a member

sezgin — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:19:49 GMT

Could it be because of the below:

https://docs.databricks.com/api/account/accountgroups/list

Gets all details of the groups associated with the Databricks account. As of 08/22/2025, this endpoint will no longer return members. Instead, members should be retrieved by iterating through Get group details. Existing accounts that rely on this attribute will not be impacted and will continue receiving member data as before.